A great opportunity for recent college graduates with good grades interested in legal issues and public policy: my current research assistant is Princeton-bound to get the Ph.D. that will give him a better resume than mine, so the AEI Liability Project is hiring, and hiring very soon:
Research Assistant: Liability Project
Seeking a full-time research assistant for the AEI Liability Project. The Liability Project examines the institutions, procedures, and political economy of contemporary liability law through research, publications, and other activities.
This position provides research support on issues related to American federalism and tort reform through case and brief retrieval, citation checking, case summarization, and legal analysis. It will also involve cultivating relationships with academics and practitioners in the field and overseeing the production of several monographs per year, as well as such administrative tasks as conference planning, editing, mass mailings, and data entry.
The ideal candidate will have excellent organizational, writing, and editing skills, as well as an interest in public policy and/or tort reform. Legal research experience and a background in economics preferred.
Qualified applicants should submit a resume, cover letter, and a 500-word writing sample on any topic with their online application.
This position will be available Summer 2007.
More information about applying, including a link to a Washingtonian article naming AEI as one of 55 great places to work in Washington. (Don’t contact me directly; all hiring is done through AEI Human Resources, but successfully indicating that you’ve been a regular reader of what I’ve been writing will surely help.)
3 Comments
OT, but could someone please tell me what the point of a lawsuit is?
Serious question–isn’t it just a form of vigilantism and completely unregulated at that, a way for people with axes to grind to attack people/groups with unpopular opinions or actions, even if those actions are legal? I’m not talking about the traditional frivolous lawsuit, but all lawsuits: I’m uncomfortable with the philosophy behind it.
“People getting a redress of their grievances when the government won’t take action” was one of the Southern racists’ defenses of lynching, too, so that’s a tough argument to make IMO.
The Democratic argument is that trial lawyers donate to the Democrats, so tort reform is being used by the Republicans as a tactic to defund the Democratic Party–so even if lawsuits aren’t the best way to go about regulation, we shouldn’t restrict them, because doing so would hurt the Democrats. I’m sure you’ve all heard this, but I wonder why an organization that acts like that is deserving of my support. If there’s a better reason that I’m not picking up, please correct me.
This isn’t my field; I’m sorry if I sound ignorant.
There are several reasons civil lawsuits exist.
One is for enforcement of contracts. A contract wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on if there was no means of enforcing the terms. Western societies have all chosen civil courts as that method.
The other major reason is to force someone who has caused you an injury to compensate you for your loss. For example, if I slash holes in your above ground swimming pool you can call the police and have me arrested for vandalism. I may even serve a few days in jail. But that doesn’t replace your swimming pool. If I won’t pay you voluntarily you take me to court to force me to pay for my actions.
Over all it’s a good, workable system. It is, however, subject to abuse. This site highlights such abuses and pushes for reforms to make those abuses less common.
Throwing out the ability to sue altogether would require finding other ways to accomplish the legitimate goals of the civil court system, and so far as I can tell no country in the world has found a better alternative.
In addition to what Timothy said, the purpose of a tort lawsuit (this kind) is supposed to be to make the injured party whole. For example, if a drunk driver smacks into your legally parked car, you can sue him for the cost of repairs. You aren’t suing to punish him, but to recover what his negligence cost you.
The trouble is, some underemployed lawyers will sue on ridiculous theories, in the hopes that either they get paid just to go away, or get the sympathy of a stupid and irresponsible jury. E.g., in the next story in Overlawyered, the father of a dead drunk driver is suing the people he ran into, and everyone else associated in any way. Judges are supposed to throw out frivolous lawsuits, but use such a narrow and lawyerly definition of “frivolous” that any lawsuit that claims to have evidence supporting a bizarre theory is allowed – and then the defendants bear the cost of disproving it. Often they’ll save money by settling (paying something) versus the costs of defense. And if it doesn’t work, typically the lawyer was working on contingency, so the plaintiff loses nothing and the lawyer loses mainly his time.
The most effective reform I can see is some form of a “loser pays” system. If losing plaintiffs had to pay the costs of the defense and the court, this would discourage some plaintiffs from filing suits that are unlikely to win and encourage defendants to fight silly suits, but it doesn’t do much to discourage indigents (or those too ignorant to know they could be putting their property at risk) from letting lawyers file on their behalf.
I think if it’s a contingency case or there is otherwise doubt about the ability of a losing plaintiff to pay the costs, the jury should also consider whether the plaintiff’s lawyer should have known that the case was unreasonable, and if so make him secondarily responsible for paying the costs.